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Thursday, April 23, 2009

Protecting Marriage is Protecting Children

In the vigorous debate over homosexual marriage, most adults have very strong feelings and are not hesitant to share them. Yet one part, the most important part of the marriage debate---the child, is rarely consulted and often not considered.

I have watched homosexuals bring their children forward at the hearings in Olympia as they testified in favor of various homosexual rights bills and ask their child to make a plea to the lawmakers. As the little kids said what they were supposed to say, I have wondered how they really felt---and, does anyone really care?

As a youth pastor in Hollywood, I have walked with and ministered to kids who were raised in homosexual homes. It was not pretty.

Protecting marriage is protecting children.

David Blankenhorn wrote an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times last September 19, prior to the vote on Prop. 8.

His column begins with, "I am a liberal Democrat. And I do not favor same-sex marriage."

He says, "Many seem to believe that marriage is simply a private love relationship between two people. They accept this view, in part, because Americans have increasingly emphasized and come to value the intimate, emotional side of marriage, and in part because almost all opinion leaders today, from journalists to judges, strongly embrace this position."

"But," he says, "I spent a year studying the history and anthropology of marriage, and I've come to a different conclusion."

His "different conclusions" if read with an open mind, will give anyone, except perhaps a hard core homosexual activist, reason for pause and reflection.

I have summarized his "different conclusions," as a liberal Democrat and taking an honest look at homosexual marriage. I have also linked his column.

*In all societies marriage shapes the rights and obligations of parenthood.

*Marriage is not primarily a license to have sex. Nor is it a license to receive benefits or social recognition.

*Marriage is primarily a license to have children.

*Marriage is a gift that society bestows on it's next generation.

*Marriage unites the three cord dimension of parenthood---biological, social and legal---into one pro-child form.

*Marriage is society's most pro-child institution.

*Child Trends, a non partisan research group has found that family structures clearly matters for children and the family structure that helps children the most is a family headed by two biological parents.

*Children have the right, insofar as society can make it possible, to know and to be cared for by the two parents who brought them into the world. The 1989 U.N. Convention on Rights of the Child, specifically guarantees children this right.

*Every child being raised by gay or lesbian couples will be denied his birthright to both parents who made him.

*We must be permitted to openly discuss what our society owes it's children. Particularly when looking at legislation like Prop. 8.

*Do you think that every child deserves his mother and father?

*Do you suspect that fathers and mothers are different from one another?

*Do you imagine that biological ties matter to children?

*How many parents per child is best?

*In regard to same-sex marriage, children are rarely consulted.

*"I believe with all my heart in the right of the child to the mother and father who made her."

*"I believe that we, as a society, should seek to maintain and strengthen the only human institution ---marriage---that is specifically intended to safeguard that right and make it real for our children".

His conclusion is this:

"Legalized same-sex marriage almost certainly benefits those same-sex couples who choose to marry, as well as the children being raised in those homes. But changing the meaning of marriage to accommodate homosexual orientation, further and perhaps definitively undermines for all of us the very thing---the gift, the birthright---that is marriage's most distinctive contribution to human society. That's a change that, in the final analysis, I cannot support"

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